Mayor Cory Booker takes over a city poised to re-emerge nationally if he can fulfill the bright promise he offers.

By Mat Edelson

At the intersection of Hope and Despair, a child's schoolyard mural asks the question that is buzzing around both poverty-battered Newark and its newly elected wunderkind mayor, Cory Booker. "What can I be?" inquires Nate Elliott (and we know it is he who wonders about his future, for Nate has, with a youngster's pride, loudly scrawled his name mostly horizontally across his cement-canvassed vision of Mother Earth). If he'd been of a mind to do a slow 360 while contemplating his task in the security-fenced asphalt schoolyard, our young artist would have been confronted with his answer: Promising potentialities confronting disturbing realities. A vibrant Home Depot in the distance, framed by squeegee kids in the foreground. A brand-new, low-income housing sub-division-its style identical to $400,000 townhomes just miles away-set against a dilapidated project, its withered aluminum siding as droopy as an old bloodhound's ears. As for the school system responsible for Mr. Elliott's future, it, too, seems caught on the cusp: Half of its students graduate high school. Half get tossed to its streets, the same streets that saw eight shootings in the weekend prior to the new mayor's inauguration.

Young Master Elliott has begged the query. For himself. For his weary neighbors. For an optimistic business community. For a city whose time has come, but could just as quickly pass.

"What can I be?"

It may well fall upon young Mr. Booker to decide.

A survey of Newark's business leaders yields many opinions about Cory Booker and one consensus: From all appearances, he is the right man at the right time to return Newark to the national prominence it hasn't known since the 1940s. Decimated by the riots of the '60s, the city has known only two mayors since that turbulent era: Kenneth Gibson, elected as Newark's first African-American mayor in 1970, and Sharpe James, who ran City Hall from 1986 until this past May, when he decided to abdicate rather than face a contentious rematch with the 37-year-old Booker.

Despite the vice-like grip James held on Newark-he survived corruption findings within his administration and video documentation of numerous incidents of intimidation against Booker in their 2002 race-James helped create the foundation for Newark's resurgence. Under his leader-ship the city's population-which dropped by 30 percent after the riots-is showing signs of growth for the first time in 30 years. His New Jersey Performing Arts Center-NJPAC-stands as a shining centerpiece to the city's emerging cultural commitment, and James squired several important improvement projects, including the resurrection of the Portuguese Ironbound district. "Sharpe James was a cheerleader for our city, and extraordinary in that way," says Bill Marino, CEO of Newark's Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Yet after two decades, James was clearly a cheerleader getting long in the tassels. When Booker burst on the scene as a young, middle-class, suburban-raised upstart whose look ( GQ), background (Stanford football star/Rhodes Scholar/lawyer), and commitment (he lives in Brick Towers, one of Newark's notorious projects), he caught the eye of U.S. News & World Report, New York Magazine, and the NY Times Sunday Magazine and Newark revved up for something it hadn't seen in a generation: a political donnybrook. "The first time [Booker ran] was really a shock to the system that a Democrat was challenging a Democrat in Newark. That was news unto itself. Then they had the documentary, which raised awareness," says Noah Wrubel, owner of Newark's Bare Necessities, which according to Inc. Magazine is America's tenth-quickest growing urban company. The documentary to which Wrubel refers is Street Fight, an Academy Award-nominated chronicle of Booker's struggles against the James machine. With James refusing writer/director Marshall Curry any meaningful access, the documentary became a vehicle for the charismatic Booker's missionary-like zeal to improve his adopted home-town, where he served as a city councilman before losing the 2002 may-oral election by a few thousand votes. "By the time he ran again," says Wrubel, "maybe it wasn't a fait accompli, but people had a sense he had a real shot. He was the next guy to carry the mantle."

With Booker's overwhelming win in May-a Booker-backed ticket also captured control of the City Council-Newark's business community now has as its champion an up-and-comer whom national observers say has a political future as bright as another rising African-American Democratic star, Illinois Senator Barack Obama. One New York publication cut right to the chase, asking in its headline: "Will Cory Booker be The First Black President of the United States?" Perhaps, but first things first. Newark is Booker's chance to show his organizational moxie on a scale far beyond the scope of his previous efforts. Law partner, founder of the non-profit Newark Now-these are all on the Booker resume, but business leaders say such endeavors may not amount to much more than batting practice. Referring to Booker's business background, Al Koeppe, former PSE&G COO and Bell Atlantic New Jersey CEO, says, "I think the non-profit experience is a very good threshold experience, but there's very little that can prepare you to run a city other than running a large corporation. When you get there, you're in the game, you better hope you have the right skill sets next to you, and you better be prepared to make mistakes."

In some eyes, Booker has already blundered, charging $500 a ticket-and $30,000 for a luxury suite-to attend his inauguration ball. For a man who claimed to be of the people, the fact that he was giving away numerous seats to poor constituents and donating the event's proceeds to charity did little to mollify the annoyed. "The timing was wrong. The message was wrong," wrote Newark Star-Ledger City Hall columnist Joan Whitlow.

Still, such opening-night missteps might be chalked up to youthful exuberance. In the matters that matter most, Booker is reaching out to Newark's business community in all the right ways. A constant criticism of the James administration was its lack of a unified, cohesive vision for the city. After NJPAC opened in 1997, the reaction was positive but haphazard. "You started to see cranes in the sky all over the city," says Koeppe, who now runs one of Newark's largest business consortiums, the Newark Alliance. "There was development going. It wasn't necessarily well-planned, but there was interest in Newark."

How that interest was received in City Hall was a hit-or-miss proposition. As Koeppe puts it, "there was a very arrhythmic relationship between developers who came to the city and the Mayor's office." With no central ombudsmen in City Hall for development deals, the fortunes of any given project could rest on in whose office the paperwork landed, and whether that person had the skill set to understand the value of the deal to the city. For a city long starving for business growth, such a take-all-comers haphazard approach was understandable, as when opportunity came it often appeared in sudden, tsunami-like waves. The most notable occurred in the days and weeks after 9/11, when lower Manhattan businesses gobbled up any office space they could across the Hudson. While the big boys went directly across the river, "a lot of smaller, $10 million to $100 million companies, who would not be able to afford the rents in Jersey City, they went to Newark," recalls NJBIZ.com reporter Shankar Parameshwaran. That was followed over the next two years by the creation of office space dedicated to protecting the massive amount of data generated by financial firms.

Though those needs have mostly been met, another business boom is in the offing, again generated by the dynamo that is New York City. "Midtown has a low vacancy rate of 1 or 2 percent, and rates are going through the roof," says Parameshwaran, who writes under the moniker "Shankar P." "People are paying 100 bucks a square foot [in Manhattan]. This will bring a third wave, and Newark and Jersey City will be the top beneficiaries. So Cory Booker is actually coming in at the confluence of several good things."

And unlike his predecessor, Booker is creating a comprehensive business template to focus his efforts before the horses leave the barn. He's even pulled a "Whoa, Nellie!" on the fleeing strays. Before he'd taken office, Booker successfully sued to stop what he called "sweetheart" land deals traditionally rubber-stamped by the City Council, some of which he had reportedly voted for during his earlier time on that body.

Booker has even threatened to squash the controversial new home of the New Jersey Devils, even though $70 million of Newark's money has already been spent to launch construction of the arena. The arena, slated to open in 2007, is contracted to receive $210 million, but there are rumors that Booker is researching the costs involved in breaking the deal. "This is a poorly conceived project, an unnecessarily rushed project. A project that is not the best use of land and city resource," Booker told the Star-Ledger, days after the Devils changed management companies over-seeing the project.

This cautious approach has earned Booker praise for those looking for a better, transparent business model for Newark. "The land deals that he's criticized...I believe the fact that he's looking at it with a great deal of scrutiny means there could be a methodology for allowing [public/private partnerships] to happen in a way that it's not perceived as dealing with cronies, friends; it's more the proper way of conducting the business of making the city grow," says Alex Garcia, president of El Taller Colaborativo, a Newark-based architectural and engineering firm that's designed many of the area's train stations.

As part of his transition, Booker is tasking numerous community, business and academic leaders to prepare white papers. Early indications are these briefs won't collect dust. Dr. Steven Diner, provost of Rutgers' Newark campus, says "I talked to him and sent him a list of 50 faculty with expertise in different areas. Many of them-20, 25-have been called and have participated in transition discussions, so there's an openness to look to the universities for expertise, a comfort level with academic expertise that's very exciting for us."

Indeed, Newark's long-term financial success probably resides within its academic halls. "We have more students here than they have in Cambridge," says Gabriella E. Morris, president of The Prudential Foundation, the philanthropy, community, and educational development arm of Prudential, Inc. Fifty-thousand college students and faculty-nearly one-sixth of Newark's population-fill the Newark campuses of Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, Essex County College, and Seton Hall University School of Law. Creating synergies between academia, the business community, and City Hall is seen as a top priority for many concerned with Newark's economic development. The Newark Alliance engaged Harvard Professor Michael Porter's consulting firm, Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, to create Opportunity Newark: Jobs and Community Development for the 21st Century.

Part of Opportunity Newark's plan is to engage higher education to think strategically about curricula, internship programs, and educational career tracks that will create sustainable Newark-based jobs for graduates. Given Booker's familiarity with business and higher academia, both sides feel they have an advocate for their cause. This includes further city involvement in developing student residential housing in the University Heights district and projects such as Science Park and the Digital Century Center building, where incubator companies bring intellectual capital to fruition. In the past, such ideas had no place in Newark to prosper.

"There really was no point person [in City Hall] for either higher education or education in general," says Essex County College President Dr. A. Zachary Yamba, who sits on the Council for Higher Education in Newark (CHEN). "Our hope is he will bring in someone as a point person or surround himself with people who understand the role of higher education in urban revitalization. We think because of his [academic] background, it shouldn't be hard to find."

What Newark really is asking Booker to do is to give the city an extreme makeover, especially regarding how America perceives the area. "There are image problems," says Dennis Bone, president of Verizon New Jersey, which has its headquarters in Newark. "Many people in the business community look at Newark and say it has a great future, but they don't want to take that next step and invest." Yet, much as Martin O'Malley became the young, hip mayoral face that raised the national media esteem of once-blighted Baltimore, Dennis Bone feels Cory Booker's talents, looks, and persona could elevate Newark. "Cory is smart, articulate, and, for a new mayor with only one term on the City Council, he is already on the national stage. People see that, see a freshness in Newark, and say, 'I believe it will take off now.' We're sitting on the brink of greatness, hundreds of opportunities," says Bone, before adding a caveat. "But a year from now, if the new administration doesn't perform, those opportunities will be quick to go away. Not that I'm saying that will happen. A lot of investment is poised to come here."

It's up to Cory Booker to bring it home.

Mat Edelson is an award-winning writer based in Baltimore, Maryland.